Pinterest To Launch New Ad Targeting And Conversion Tracking Features

Pinterest may still be a relatively young social network, compared to rivals like Facebook and Twitter, but its advertising products are quickly catching up to the rest of the market. The company recently quietly announced that it will soon offer new conversion tracking and audience targeting features to its advertisers which will allow them to better understand how Promoted Pins affect their business, and what can be done to further personalize those Pins for Pinterest users.

The company says it will update its Privacy Policy on October 19, and offered a preview of the forthcoming changes. Here, Pinterest explains that it will begin to collect information from online advertisers, like whether clicks on ads led to purchases or information like a list of criteria to use in targeting ads. A Help Center article went on to further detail what advertisers will share with Pinterest as well as gather from their own Promoted Pins on the Pinterest site going forward.

For starters, advertisers will now be able to add a tracking pixel to their Promoted Pins to collect information on how well a Pin is doing. Meanwhile, a pixel on the advertiser’s website will help them understand how Pins relate to actual website conversions. That is, the pixel on the advertiser’s site can determine which customers are arriving after either viewing or clicking on an advertiser’s Promoted Pin. (This data may also be used to customize a consumer’s Pinterest experience, the company notes).

The above changes will allow Pinterest advertisers to better measure the effectiveness of their ads on the social network (aka, Promoted Pins), by measuring not only which Pins encourage users to click through on and then checkout, but which Pinterest users later convert to buyers after simply viewing these Promoted Pins.

In addition, another new option for advertisers is the ability for them to share a “hash” (an anonymized scramble) of some identifiers, like customer email addresses. This is something both Facebook and Twitter already support in their own ads products. It means that Pinterest advertisers will now be able to match their Promoted Pins to specific groups of users, like those who have made purchases on the advertiser’s website in the past, or those who have signed up to hear about deals via an email newsletter.

Pinterest end users will still be able to opt-out of these more personalized and targeted ads if they choose, by going online to Pinterest’s website and making changes in their account settings. Under the “Personalization” section, there are toggle switches that let you specify whether or not Pinterest can personalize ads based on sites visited recently, or whether it can do so by using info from ad partners. To opt out, users can just click the setting to change it from the default “yes” to “no.” Pinterest will also continue to support “Do Not Track,” the company says.

Promoted Pins have been in testing with a small group of Pinterest advertisers since May, and only in the U.S. For now, that hasn’t changed, notes Pinterest.